The Covenant of Nightfall
by Omniskriba
Summary: After eons of rule, the holy beasts decide to pass on the power before they completely loose it. Years before, they created a vessel to recive this power. His name is Jyou Kido.
1. Prologue

The Covenant of Nightfall  
By Kyoko Jyou  
~*~  
Disclaimer: Digimon is not Mine. Happy now?  
~*~  
Nobody would have guessed it.  
Nobody dared believe it.  
But it was and nobody could deny it.  
Destiny demanded fulfillment and retalliation was futile at best.  
Obedience was not an option, it was the inevitable decision.  
~*~  
Twenty years have passed since that fated evening.  
Sasuke Kido could still feel the bite of the wounds which left her scarred physically and mentally, a psychosomatic tendency triggered whenever she hears the clanging of shrine chimes or smells the scent of lavender incense as tossed by the Autumn winds of October.  
She would dream about it, vividly... unspeakably clear in vision; that ill encounter at that shrine in Kyoto. She had tried for two decades to run away from the memory yet it returns to haunt her.  
And haunt her it does.  
Twenty Years ago, on a shrine at the very heart of Kyoto, a young woman, wife to a renowned surgeon and mother of two children, was found raped before the shrine's stone marker. No one knew who it was who attacked her. Not even she knows for sure.  
Yet she was sure that whoever it was, he was not who he was supposed by everybody to be.  
A sex-driven pervert? She wished.  
She remembered seeing his eyes... they were so empty... yet within them seemed an expanse which stretched miles...  
She could feel in him something like the fury of a Phoenix, the strenght of a Tiger, the wisdom of a Tortoise and the power of a Dragon rolled into one... his hands clawing deep unto her skin, his body pressed onto hers.  
He was not a man... almost divine but not quite...  
And nine months later, she gave birth to a son, thus beginning her denial that this boy came from anybody but her husband. He seemed like a Kido enough. Azure hair, slate gray eyes. He was nothing his brothers were not.  
Or so she thought.  
~*~  
Chapter One: Prelude- Dusk before Nightfall  
~*~  
[Yucatan Peninsula, 30 miles South East of Merida, Mexico]  
"Shin! Come... I have to show you something..."  
Dr. Takenouchi gently brushed the dust off the pitted surface of the black stone slab before them, slowly revealing a familiar image inscribed on the surface. Shin cautiously traced his fingers across the image- that of four mythical creatures resting on the inside angles of what seems to be a simple crucifix.  
The blazing Yucatan sun shone overhead, bathing the Mayan Observatory at Chichén Itzá.  
The two worked carefully under the stonework dome, lit in the inside by impromptu windows carved by centuries of ruin as well as the original perforations which allowed the ancient priests to gaze unto the stars.  
"It's another one..." Shin said, mildly surprised.  
"That makes twelve."  
Shin drew his palm top from the pockets of his jeans, promptly entering the coordinates of the stone slab.  
"91º West, 21º North"  
In an instant, the tiny device changed into a map interface, plotting the location of two other stone slabs. Points indicated similar findings in Mexico City (Tenochtitlán) and New Orleans (Nanchéz). Pressing a command, the points suddenly interlinked, creating a right triangle.  
"Dr. Takenouchi, sir. It's another triangle as well."  
"So the Americas also have one. I believe I am sensing a pattern here."  
He began to recall the other locations:  
Kyoto, Hong Kong, Beijing...  
Cairo, Jerusalem, Mecca...   
Delphi, Rome, Istanbul...  
Now these three.  
"Four Holy Beasts, Four Triangles..."  
"And a cross..."  
"What?"  
"Look closely." Dr. Takenouchi promptly draws a map from his vest pocket and does a connect-the-dots bit with his pen, joining four points together. "Between these four triangles lie four arguable portals to other dimensions: The Bermuda Triangle, Thera- the rumored site of Atlantis, Tibet- the rumored site of Shangri-La and the Mariana Trench. On a globe, these four points create a cross formation deep into the center of the earth."  
Shuu entered the four additional coordinates into his palmtop. "According to my records, we would create this pattern." Shuu showed the monitor to Takenouchi who was surprised at his student's lack of astonishment. He grabbed the PDA and stuck it at Shin's bespectacled face. "Shuu, don't you realize what you've just formed!?"  
Shuu focused his eyes on the screen, looking carefully at the figure of a cross flanked with four right triangles.  
"It's... it's..."  
"You're brother's crest!"  
"But... why?"  
"I dunno, Shuu. But something tells me we've stumbled onto this information a little too late..."  
~*~  
[Somewhere]  
"Azulongmon, Ebonwumon, Baihumon, Xuanwumon... my days as Supreme Arbiter to the Digital World is passing. Your consolidated power which brought forth my existance is failing slowly..."  
On a seemingly endless expanse of pitch black, a man cloaked in regal black robes layed helplessly on a silver disc where four orbs of light hovered nearby before him, each one located on one of the cardinal points of the compass.  
Each orb contained the sentient digi-eggs of the Digital Four... the Beasts considered most powerful in the Digital World. Each one acted as the conscious mind of their respective digimon, so placed around the weakening man, as they had been for aeons, to support his existence.  
"...This is why I command you to pour now the rivers of power unto the lips of the child of the One Crest. The time of our subservience to the Overworld is over... although with it, we too must fade away..."  
The four orbs glowed in what seemed to be quiet understanding.  
"Your union now becomes complete. By the power you have invested upon me, I now rule that the powers four which govern the Digital Universe be now and forevermore passed unto he which by birthright is greater than the sum total of all four primal forces combined- Creation, Destruction, Order, Chaos... Let the Four Guardian Beasts and the Arbiter which speaks on their behalf be no more... and may the holder of the One Crest receive all our might... SO BE IT!"  
Thunder and Lightning ripped through their abyss. The man exploded into a shattering shimmer of bright lights while the orbs dissolved into sparks which criss-crossed in all directions.  
There was a greater tremor in the Digital World as there ever was... and then, silence.  
~*~  
Shuu and Dr. Takenouchi felt the ground quake below their feet. The Ancient Mayan Observatory seemed to crumble at its stonework foundation, moved by some invisible force.  
"Sir, what's going on?"  
"I don't know Shuu! This certainly ain't an Earthquake..."  
"How could you tell?"  
"Look..."  
Dr Takenouchi pointed up at the inner wall of the stone dome. What seemed to be inscriptions formerly invisible, hidden in the shadows and untouched by the outside sun for hundreds of years were now clearly visible as a bright greenish energy pulse coursed throgh the grooves.  
Like a circuit pulsing with electricity, the entire interior of the observitory dome was bathed in mysterious light, the outside sky now overcast and dark. Lightning rained from the heavens and thunder could be heard for miles.  
Suddenly, the energy which coursed through the dome wall leapt into the air and converged overhead. Dr Takenouchi and Shuu could only grasp each other in fear as they watched the energy pulse swish and sizzle above them.  
Then, in a powerful explosion of light, a continuous blast of pure energy rocketed skywards from where the pulses converged, piercing the overcast grey which was the sky.  
~*~  
"We interrupt this program for a special news bulletin"  
"Panic has struck the citizens of many countries around the world after the appearance of unidentified white energy blasts over their respected national airspaces only a few minutes ago. While no one was hurt during the generation of these blasts nor on the cases when the blasts converged into groups of three and subsequently exploded, many governments consider these lights as potential threats to global security."  
Jyou looked at the television, leaving his mug of scalding hot coffee too cool down a bit on the wooden bar top of his fave café place. It couldn't be another digimon attack, he thought to himself.  
He picked up his mug and held it close to his lips.  
To his surprise, a strange formation of concentric rings formed out of bubbles streaming from under his coffee. As he stooped down for closer inspection... something very odd happened.  
A thunderous flash of bright white light exploded from within his mug, shooting straight into his face. The other café patrons ran out of fear, chased from within by glowing orbs which had materialized around the hapless glasses-wearing nerd who had what seemed to be a photographer's flash bulb shot at him at face distance.  
"Uh... I'm okay... no need to worry... I'm just a bit... blind... uh... hello? Hello?"  
Trying to get up, Jyou trips.  
"Uhm... can anybody please help me up?" 


	2. Appointment by Fire

The Covenant of Nightfall By Kyoko Jyou   
Chapter Two: Appointment by Fire   
Needless to say, being shot by the concentrarted light of a million suns at point blank range was a very unpleasant sensation. For a full fifteen minutes, Jyou stumbled helplessly on the coffee shop floor, his long bony fingers clawing at his eyes as if his corneas had caught on fire.  
Everything within a few meters of him was reduced into fine gray ash, now gently blown around by the wind, waffling through the anxious crowds that had gathered around what was left of the caffeine-dispensing establishment.  
  
[Inoue Shop-o-Mart, Odaiba, Japan]  
"As mysteriously and as suddenly as the strange phenomena began, so did they end - seemingly - on this very spot where, approximately five minutes ago, a local café was obliterated by a destructive barrage of blinding white lights."  
Taisho Inoue heard the thud and the crash on his grocery floor from behind the counter and, as thuds and crashes go, knew for certain that it can't be a good sign. Mrs. Kido had suddenly become frozen in her place to the dismay of the two old ladies and the young man on the queue.  
Apparently, her grocery bag containing one carton of eggs, a carton of milk, two loaves of bread and an extra-large bottle of wasabe extract had fallen flat on the ground - not that it seemed to matter at the moment. Mr. Inoue was left standing there, dumbfounded by the situation. Mrs. Kido was as pale as a ghost, stiff as a ladder, her eyes lifelessly fixed on the little television by the cash register and her free hand was hermetically clutching the wad of bills Mr. Inoue had been anticipating from her all this time.  
"Mrs Kido… are you alright?"  
She kept silent, shaking fiercely in what seemed to be abject terror.  
"Only this young man was found on the site. Eyewitness accounts confirm that the lights had, infact, appeared from his coffee mug." The television new anchor continued. "Although the boy was found to have miraculously withstood the event without any burns whatsoever, he will be taken to a nearby hospital where he will be treated of severe optical trauma, the only damage we know he sustained as of this moment."  
The young man had been Jyou.  
Her son… Her youngest son… slowly hauled into an ambulance to be taken who-knows-where… But then… she saw them… For a scant few seconds during a forced-zoom close-up… Jyou's eyes… For a moment's time he had opened them, too fast for anybody to see what lied beneath. For anybody… that is… except poor, petrified Mrs. Kido, holding up a line at the Inoue Shop-O-Mart.  
Taken aback then collapsing in an outburst of tears and cold sweat, Sasuke Kido curled up against the counter like an unborn child with her hands clenched upon her hair. Mr. Inoue had raced to her side, panickingly trying to calm her down.  
"Mrs Kido! What is going on!?"  
Sasuke, finding it hard to speak coherently through her bawling, spoke only in broken sentences, each word barely escaping the shortness of her breath and the constricting pain in her heart "It… has begun… They have come to take him… THEY HAVE COME…"  
  
[Channel 3 Video Archives, Channel 3 Headquarters, Odaiba, Japan]  
"Stop the footage riiiight… there!"  
Mr. Ishida and a spiky haired assistant basked in the bright glow of a video monitor, cloistered in a dark room decked from floor to ceiling with archived videos and compact discs.  
At the moment the assistant freeze-framed the footage, Mr. Ishida prodded a finger on the screen.  
"Hmmm…"  
"What is that, sir?"  
"I haven't the faintest idea…"  
The monitors framed the close-up of a familiar young man although something horribly wrong with his eyes was caught on tape as he opened them for half a second before shutting them tightly again underneath his glasses.  
Zooming the footage carefully, the anomaly had began to take a coherent shape.  
Inscriptions. Minute but finely-detailed symbols where grotesquely burnt and tatooed onto his eyes in macabre lines. His iris was glowing furiously in white. It seems that nobody had noticed in the panic.  
"Any idea who this boy might be?"  
"Y…yeah… that's my kid's friend! Stay here… I have to call my son…"  
  
Doctor, we came as soon as we found out… how's…"  
"Your friend? He's fine. We're actually quite surprised how he survived a blast that leveled an entire building… clothes and all. You can visit him inside the ward if you want…"  
Taichi, Daisuke and Sora broke a sigh of relief as Jyou's doctor allowed them into the recovery ward. Waiting for them, sitting imposingly on a steel-framed bed wearing the white shirt he had under his blazer this morning and a slightly dusty pair of jeans about a size too short. A green hospital gown was neatly folded beside him, weighed down by a copy of "Newtype" which he had been browising over just before the three came in.  
"Jyou!" Sora exclaimed as she ran to his side, throwing her arms across Jyou's wide shoulders, resting her head on his chest. "Jyou… it's so good to know you made it…"  
"We heard the news on the radio." Tai followed suit, landing an arm over Jyou's back as Sora started withdrawing herself.  
"Yeah, man… what happened!?" Daisuke prodded as took one of Jyou's large, rough hands and grasped it with both of his, anticipating Jyou's account of his miraculous escape."  
"You had us worried… I was at tennis practice when the news came in. When I heard your name announced… goodness… I had to pull these two out of soccer practice."  
"We'd have gotten here sooner if we'd known, y'know…"  
"Oh yeah, I guess you could've gotten her fast enough if you're car didn't break down every few blocks…"  
"My car only broke down once this trip Sora!"  
"Not if you count starter plugs you had to replace before you even got us in your car Tai!"  
"Okay… so I wonder who told us to go left at the town founder statue SORA!?"  
"I meant the statue's left, TAI!"  
Jyou and Daisuke standed there, totally clueless with what was going on between the two. Sora may have been dating Yamato since Junior High although there's no denying that certain something between them.  
Sora broke Taichi's heart the day Sora went out with Yamato.  
Taichi broke her's when he didn't seem to care.  
Yamato… well Yamato's Yamato all the same and the three hardly spoke about the matter.  
"Anyway… Jyou… how did you escape?" Daisuke asked again, his voiced hushed down so as not to intrude on the bickering "couple". It was a good thing that Jyou was the only patient there or the two would have been hauled right out of there. "I'm as confused about it as you are. I've gone through three x-rays and if our health plan covered free CAT scans I'd had gone through one too but they found nothing… not even on my clothes!"  
"Cool!"  
Suddenly, the ward door swung open again, revealing the rest of their motley crew.  
"Jyou!" Hikari, Koushirou and Iori found themselves calling out in unison as they and the rest of the newcommers ran to his side grabbing whatever loose end Jyou had on his person. Yamato took great pleasure in messing up the only head of hair in the room that was as meticulously cleaned and groomed as his before taking to Sora's side, to much of Taichi's consternation. Ken contented himself with putting Jyou on a mock-headlock after everybody's settled down.  
Apparently, Yamato had been driving around town to pick everybody up in his band's van. Hikari and Takeru was in the library, Koushirou was at home, Iori was inhis grandfather's dojo and Ken was in a community center playing go with the elderly. Miyako was in the library too but her father had called her on an errand before Yamato had gotten there.  
"Before anybody asks any questions, let me beat you to answering it now - I have absolutely no idea what happened." Jyou smirked as the chosen children shot each other with dazed looks."  
"No idea at all?" Koushirou eeped, being the most eager of them all to unlock the conundrum at hand.  
"None whatsoever" Jyou replied teasingly.  
It wasn't until this point that Yamato remembered what his father had asked him to check… Jyou's eyes.  
"Is something the matter Yamato?"  
"N… no… I was just looking at my hair through the lenses of your glasses…"  
Well, he found nothing wrong with his eyes, both bright with their normal hue of icy blue.  
But where his eyes blue? Yamato couldn't remember. But they looked normal enough. No problems there.  
"Well at least Jyou's safe!" Hikari pointed out.  
"Yeah…" Sora responded, smiling "It's good to know you're okay, Jyou".;  
"Thanks, you guys…"  
Jyou sat contented in the company of his friends.  
It was just like old times… more or less.  
Taichi has certainly grown much. At nineteen years old he was about 5'11, four inches taller than Sora. His hair was nowhere as unkempt as it used to be although his dark brown goatee was a good indication that he kept his deviance.  
Sora, 5'7 with longish brown hair, had grown into a fine young woman, loosing much of he tomboyish behavior to a more mature, more demure style… but it never kept her from knocking Taichi's lights out when she felt like it.  
Yamato, nineteen as well, had grown into and out of the entire rock band image. Standing around 5'10", he was as ruggedly good-looking and as ruggedly cocky as should be expected from him although being Sora had polished him up a bit, socially speaking. He couldn't stand being shorter than Taichi though.  
Koushirou, still the consummate computer freak, was not one to change much apart from growing up. At eighteen, the boy was 6'2" tall with clumsily tamed auburn hair and a pair of prescription coke-bottle horn-rims that corrected the near-sightedness caused by staring at computer monitors longer than the time needed to get a facial tan.  
Another digidestined apparently struck by irreversible nearsightedness was Ken, 6'0" at seventeen years old, who had gone to great lenghts to find glasses nowhere near as dorky as Koushirou's. While technically not a super genius or a super athlete anymore, he's gotten enough exercise, study and experience for some things to stick.  
Daisuke was everything you'd expect from him. At seventeen, he still acts like a twelve year-old, save for the fact that he's now as tall as Ken and has grown strong from pulling noodle carts during the summer vacations.  
Hikari, quaint seventeen year-old Hikari, has found herself well adjusted in her existence as just-another-girl again. A very popular and attractive girl, perhaps, but nothing awe-inspiringly wonderful. Daisuke did find it extremely hard to swallow that she's seeing other, non-digidestined, guys although Takeru doesn't seem too frazzled about it.  
Speaking of Takeru, the seventeen year-old remains in the shadow of his elder brother - around an inch taller and quite a bit stronger but much quiter and withdrawn. Being the digidestined of hope matters little in a real world that dismisses the entire affair. Being a rockstar does.  
Iori, no longer the small innocent little boy, was a grown man in most respects. Around Koushirou's height at the tender age of fifteen, Iori's features were quite matured, much to the liking of giddy highschool girls.  
In the middle of the scene sat Jyou, an imposingly noble figure at 6'5" with a silky azure mane flowing down his broad back in a ponytail. His face, while covered in soot, has lost little of it's strong, angular features accented by the stubble on his chin, his cheeks and his upper lift. Between being coached by Taichi to bring his gym score up, being talked into by Yamato into taking a rockstar make-over and by simply hanging-out with the ever-athletic Ken who seemed to have clung to him closely as something of a substitute-Osamu, Jyou turned out to become as strong physically as he was mentally. As for emotionally… that's something he's still learning at Granpa Hida's dojo as payment for tutoring Iori on Saturdays.  
Only two people were missing from this happy reunion.  
One of them was the captivatingly beautiful Mimi Tachikawa… The other had just arrived.  
"Jyou! Thank goodness you're safe… I… I… I… Jyou… uh… I don't know how to say this but… I know you must still be recovering but… I think you really need to know… you're mother's here in the hospital… she's had a heart attack…"  
Miyako Inoue stuttered, approaching Jyou slowly before drawing him into a hug. Jyou was struck speechless. 


End file.
